Meebo.com is already defying expectations for its against-stereotype leadership team. Of the company's three co-founders, it's the two women who bring the engineering chops.

Sandy Jen and Elaine Wherry, with degrees in computer science and symbolic systems respectively, teamed up with fellow Stanford alum Seth Sternberg (MBA) to start Meebo, a browser-based, all-in-one instant-messaging service.

In 2005, Jen was frustrated with having to remember all 13 screen names for her various instant-messaging accounts, and after fiddling around for a few months with Wherry and Sternberg (and leasing server space with their personal credit cards), Meebo was born.

These days, Meebo claims 140 million users and has been valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Nielsen/NetRating has named it the fastest growing instant-messaging destination in the U.S., ahead of Google Talk and Skype Messenger. "We think about the Internet as an ecosystem, not a loose collection of sites," says Jen. "There is so much you can do once you are able to connect users in ways they want and need."

Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast

Meebo.com is already defying expectations for its against-stereotype leadership team. Of the company's three co-founders, it's the two women who bring the engineering chops.

Sandy Jen and Elaine Wherry, with degrees in computer science and symbolic systems respectively, teamed up with fellow Stanford alum Seth Sternberg (MBA) to start Meebo, a browser-based, all-in-one instant-messaging service.

In 2005, Jen was frustrated with having to remember all 13 screen names for her various instant-messaging accounts, and after fiddling around for a few months with Wherry and Sternberg (and leasing server space with their personal credit cards), Meebo was born.

These days, Meebo claims 140 million users and has been valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Nielsen/NetRating has named it the fastest growing instant-messaging destination in the U.S., ahead of Google Talk and Skype Messenger. "We think about the Internet as an ecosystem, not a loose collection of sites," says Jen. "There is so much you can do once you are able to connect users in ways they want and need."

Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast

Rashmi Sinha made the jump from life as an academic to the Web when she got bored of working in a lab. She started by dipping her foot into the tech arena when she cofounded Uzanto Consulting, a company that provided user research for technology products to companies like Microsoft and Yahoo!

That enterprise eventually helped launch SlideShare in 2006, where Sinha is co-founder and CEO. SlideShare is like YouTube for PowerPoint or KeyNote, creating a social network of sorts for presentations. Want feedback on your product or service?

Float it out there by uploading to SlideShare, where community members can then add to, comment, and share with others. Among Sinha's notable accolades are being named to Fast Company's Most Influential Women in Web 2.0, not to mention making it onto Playboy's list of America's sexiest CEOs.

"Women can have a different leadership style and if you don’t understand that style, it can be a blocker in funding women," Sinha writes about her own experience when seeking financial backing for SlideShare. "I don’t think they were against women CEOs, rather it was the particular leadership style they did not want to fund."

Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast

Ever since Heather Harde transitioned from Fox Interactive Media to CEO of TechCrunch in 2007, industry pundits have kept a close eye on her.

The wildly successful and profitable tech blogs of TechCrunch, started by Michael Arrington, track the minutiae of the tech business, covering everything from products to startups. (In a coup in 2006, TechCrunch broke news of Google's acquisition of YouTube.)

Harde was recruited by Arrington to grow TechCrunch from a blog to a media company, making her a major influencer among venture capitalists and technology companies. She’s used to dealing with big transactions; at Fox, she oversaw a $2 billion budget for mergers and acquisitions.

In 2007, Harde and her blog empire hosted the Crunchies, recognizing key leaders in technology and innovation. She also recently helped organize TC Disrupt, a competition and conference to hook up New York startups with investors—an event for which they struggled to get a woman-led team to attend.

For Harde, the move from a media company to TechCrunch was a perfect hybrid of her longtime interest in technology's impact on media. "I really do think blogs are going to be the future medial channel," Harde said in 2008, "because of the type of news that blogs are breaking."

Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast

Bringing together a network of 21 million women for its annual conferences, BlogHer is an online community of female bloggers who are fixing to translate their niche posts into income by connecting advertisers with potential customers.

The site draws in 20 million unique visitors a month, and its articles, culled from a network of more than 2,500 blogs, are syndicated on sites from iVillage to Yahoo! to BravoTV.com.

It has empowered some women, like Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes and Jen Yates from CakeWrecks, to turn their once-hobbies into a legitimate profession. One of the company's biggest gets was when Michelle Obama penned a blog post for them in 2008 during the presidential campaign.

"I’m excited to be posting on BlogHer," the first lady-to-be wrote. "Not only because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my daughters to, but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling all over this great country."

What's most impressive about the enterprise is that after two years of bootstrapping, Stone, Page, and Des Jardins are one of the few women-founded teams to have secured three rounds of venture funding, totaling $15.5 million. They're expecting to turn a profit this year.

Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast